Five Glasses of Sherry
by Ladybug21
Summary: After Christine Daaé's grand début at the Opéra Populaire, a disgruntled Madame Giry decides to join the managers and their wives for a drink or two or five. By the author's admission, a total crack fic of a one-shot that pretends and aspires to be nothing more.


This is, by my own admission, a total crack fic that my friend Rachel challenged me to write. I did so between the hours of 2:30 and 5:30 in the morning, which is probably why it makes so little sense; as well as why, as I continued to write, I noticed that the managers increasingly resembled Fred and George Weasley, while Madame Giry increasingly resembled Severus Snape. Nonetheless, it exists and is here posted, because the internet will support the proliferation of such harmless nonsense.

Obviously, I am neither Gaston Leroux nor, infinitely more importantly, Andrew Lloyd Webber. I therefore own nothing at all.

* * *

Five Glasses of Sherry

To everyone's shock, the opening gala had not only survived the absence of _La Carlotta_; it had benefited from it. Christine Daaé, savior of the evening and diva of the hour, was ushered off the stage by a hoard of ecstatic ballet corps girls. Madame Giry knew that Meg had insisted on staying with the newly-annointed star even after the other dancers had removed themselves from Christine's dressing room to giggle elsewhere, but heaven knew she was feeling pleased with herself for having arranged it all so neatly, so she let her silly girl detain her best friend for a touch longer than Madame Giry normally would have permitted. A cryptic bout of congratulations to Miss Daaé - who was, in her own emotionally detached way, a bit like a second daughter to Madame Giry - and her duties for the evening were done. The Phantom would see to it that any other festivities on his agenda were enacted expediently.

She finished telling off the ballet corps for their shoddy work that evening; hopefully the press would fill their allotted space with plaudits for Christine and let the dancers off easily until the damage could be remedied through hours of grueling rehearsal. As she slammed her staff authoritatively on the stage one last time to dismiss her crestfallen crew, who should appear but the new managers with their wives. Madame Giry quirked an eyebrow sardonically. Of course she would give them as much respect as their position (that is to say, their money) had earned them around the Opéra Populaire, but they would not receive a jot more from her, the buffoons. Still, so long as they continued to heed her advice with regards to the ascendant Christine Daaé, currying their good favor could still prove useful.

"Ah, Madame Giry," chortled André as Firmin bobbed up and down in a laughable bow to the ballet mistress. "Wonderful evening, simply wonderful. Our deepest congratulations to your commendable dancers."

"Indeed," replied Madame Giry with a cool smile. Really, the managers must learn that their place was in an office, not the arts, for they clearly had no idea what the basic standards in the industry were.

"Ah, André," sighed Firmin, clapping his business partner on the back jovially. "What a success. WHAT a success! My friend, I think we've done quite well for our first night on the job. Not a single refund..."

"Not a single incident courtesy of the mysterious Phantom," added André with a wink in the direction of the steely woman in black.

"And the Vicomte de Chagny poised to empty his purse into our coffers!" exulted Firmin. "I say, André, old chap, if we made every wealthy patron privy to a private rendez-vous post-show with one of our leading ladies..."

"Then poor Carlotta would find herself mightily outshone," finished André. He and Firmin looked at each other for a moment before bursting into guffaws, bending over to try to quell their laughter, arms braced around each other's shoulders.

"You have given the Vicomte de Chagny a private meeting with Miss Daaé?" said Madame Giry, whose already pale face had blanched a shade whiter.

"Oh, don't fret, Madame Giry," scolded Firmin jovially. "His intentions seem entirely honorable. Seems he was hoping to re-establish a previous friendship of sorts with Miss Daaé."

"Although, to be fair, if she has no objection to any advances on his part, there's not a whole lot we can do about it," admitted André, looking ready to burst into laughter again.

"I see," breathed Madame Giry coldly, her hand clenching around her staff. "I thank you, gentlemen, for exposing my girls to potential scandal and god knows what other abominations on your very first day. In the future, kindly leave the management of this opera house and its personnel to those who have experience with its workings."

"Awww, come off it, Madame Giry," rumbled Firmin, clapping a beefy hand on the bony shoulder of the ballet mistress. "You're the one who encouraged us to catapult Miss Daaé to stardom; you've got as much reason to celebrate as the rest of us!"

"We were just off to have a drink," André explained, twining his arm around the waist of his wife, who giggled mawkishly. "If you'd believe it, we actually haven't even had anything to drink yet."

"Except the champagne in the theater boxes," Firmin reminded him.

"And the champagne during the intermission," added André.

"And the champagne after the opera ended..."

"And then, the champagne with the Vicomte de Chagny..."

Madame Firmin shrieked slightly and dissolved into titters of pleased embarrassment; it appeared that her husband had just goosed her. Madame Giry wrinkled her nose in disdain.

"The point is," André concluded, "would you like to come celebrate with us, my dear...?"

He and Firmin stared at each other for a moment as they both realized that neither of them knew Madame Giry's Christian name. In unintentional synchronicity, they both turned to peer at her, but found no aid forthcoming.

"My dear Madame Giry," finished André lamely.

Madame Giry (who kept her Christian name to herself and far from the grasp of monied idiots like her new employers) sighed impatiently and quickly weighed her options. If she went home, she would probably have to cope with Meg pirouetting about the house and going on and on about Christine Daaé for the rest of the evening and well into breakfast the next morning. If she went out with the managers, she was sure to be bored to tears by their inanity within half an hour. But if she stayed at the opera house, she would have to cope with a temperamental Opera Ghost whose one enduring love had just been visited by an infinitely younger and more attractive man... which would probably end in a homicide or two, with which everyone would have to deal either this evening or the next day at rehearsal.

She sighed again, less impatiently than wearily. If an Erik-initiated homicide was almost inevitable, given the circumstances at hand, then better to wait out the bad news as hammered as possible.

"Gentlemen, lead on," she ordered, gesturing towards the door with the end of her staff. The only person to notice the slightly defeated slump that had pressed down upon the ballet mistress's shoulders was watching the managers and their silly wives stumble out the door from high above the departing train, carefully adjusting his mask as he did so.

* * *

It had been years since Madame Giry had really let loose and enjoyed the excesses of alcohol. Consequently, she was not expecting it to have as strong an effect on her as it did.

"Goodness, Madame Giry, are you sure you want another?" blustered Madame André as a waiter discretely removed Madame Giry's fourth glass of sherry.

"Of _course_ I'm sure!" roared Madame Giry, banging her fist upon the table to try to give the statement as much emphasis as her staff usually provided, only she halfway missed and her fist slid of the end of the table upon impact. "Oh, damn it..."

"My dear, you must learn to pace yourself!" guffawed a beet-faced Firmin, puffing merrily on a cigar. "Isn't that what you ballet mistresses do best, is set paces for others?"

"Tempos, dear Firmin, they're called tempos," slurred André, reaching for the salt cellar and instead dragging his sleeve cuff through the gravy on Firmin's plate. "Like so: And one, two, three, one, two, three..."

"You two are utterly incompetent," declared Madame Giry, waving her hand scornfully at her undistinguished managers.

"That's only because we haven't learned yet, you'll see!" retorted Firmin happily, for he was in general a very good-natured drunkard.

"No, no, I don't think you'll ever get the hang of all of it," Madame Giry told him, folding her hands on the tabletop and regarding him with the sort of pity that a schoolmarm reserves for the earnest student whom she knows will never achieve the marks he wants in the class. "You're both artistic morons, for starters."

"Now, just a minute here," fussed Madame Firmin, brandishing a dinner roll at Madame Giry, "we have a grand piano in our parlor, and our boy is learning to play it very... very competently..."

"And you've got only the slightest clue about how to manage a business and not alienate everyone in your immediate spheres," Madame Giry continued, adjusting her volume so as to drown out Madame Firmin, which inadvertently attracted the attention of all of the surrounding tables. "God only knows how you amassed enough wealth and influence to become operatic managers."

"She does have a point, it was mostly luck," André muttered to Firmin, who chuckled and took another puff of his cigar, his arm wrapped tight around his wife's ample midsection.

"And for pity's sake, start listening to the Opera Ghost," shouted Madame Giry, slamming her open palm onto the tabletop with each word of her ultimate clause and making all the silverware rattle as she did so. "Believe me, messieurs, I have known him long enough and seen him in his foulest moods to recognize what a tantrum he will throw if you dare disobey him when everything is going so well."

"Excuse me, madame," said the waiter timidly, sidling up to the table with Madame Giry's fifth glass of sherry. The ballet mistress quit mauling the tablecloth long enough for the poor lad to set the glass down and scurry away to the safety of the far side of the establishment, where he could recount the unnerving goings-on at Table 5 to the other boys in a most hyperbolic fashion.

"But that's just what I don't understand," Firmin was saying as Madame Giry took a further swig of sherry. "Who the hell is this fellow anyway, and why on earth wouldn't we want to continue to follow his advice so that things continue to go well?"

"Ah," choked Madame Giry on a bit of sherry, "well, in the future, his interests may begin to run counter to your vision for what the theater should be. He will be right, of course, and you will be wrong; but, nonetheless, you will admirably exemplify the epitome of the _nouveau-riche_ nincompoop, and I'll be called in to manage the damage control, if we don't all die in some horrific manner first."

"Oof! Sounds dreadful," embellished Madame André unnecessarily.

"And as for who he is?" prompted André, who, to his dismay, was finding the ballet mistress more and more attractive as they both become increasingly wankered.

Madame Giry fixed him with a stern look, which André found upsettingly arousing.

"That I cannot and would not say, Monsieur," she said in an almost reverent tone. "All I can reveal is that he is the guardian angel of the Opéra Populaire and the devil that haunts its corridors; he is both genius and madman; the decomposing composer. He is one of my oldest acquaintances, and I will never betray him or his secrets to the likes of _you_."

Madame Firmin, who was a romantic and had an unfailing knack for reading romance into especially situations in which romance was uncalled for, immediately detected some unresolved passion and sighed ecstatically at Madame Giry's noble defense of her long-lost lover.

"Well, that's all very well," belched Firmin, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. "But say, do we really have to pay all that money to him? We don't even have any evidence that he exists."

"My word, that's true!" André piped in, nearly upsetting his glass of Chardonnay. "Cut the sums to the Ghost and use it to maintain both Carlotta and Christine as top-billed stars. And Piangi, too, I suppose, though he's not nearly as pretty," he added as an afterthought.

"No, no, NO!" shouted Madame Giry, seizing her staff and pounding it on the floor so that half the restaurant fell silent. "There shall be only ONE star of the Opéra Populaire, and that shall be Christine Daaé, you heretics! Disbelieve me now, if you will, but face the consequences if you make that fatal error!"

"Excuse me, messieurs," muttered the restaurant proprietor, shuffling up behind Firmin and André and leaning his impressive moustache between their glowing faces. "We've been getting some complaints across the room about your louder lady friend here. You wouldn't mind taking her outside for a bit of fresh air and some calming down, now, would you?"

"An excellent idea, sir!" cried Firmin, slapping half the bill down on the table and untucking his napkin from around his chin. "André, pay up - we're all leaving."

"Oh, but my dear," pleaded Madame Firmin, clutching her husband's arm futilely in the hopes that she would get to hear more about the mysterious Opera Ghost with whom Madame Giry seemed so infatuated.

"Not another word, Amélie!" rumbled Firmin, staggering up from the table. "If you all please, mesdames, messieurs..."

André threw a few errant banknotes onto the table and fumbled his way out of the room with his wife fluttering behind him. Only Madame Giry left the restaurant with any degree of decorum, but she was able to do so only because she had her staff to lean on for support, and it was her departure that elicited the loudest sigh of relief from those assembled. Within a few seconds, the customary low rumble of the restaurant's sonic landscape was re-established.

"Well, where to next?" yelled Firmin, happily twirling his wife in the middle of the street outside. "Another bar, my good people?"

"Oh, heavens, no," groaned Madame Giry, clapping a hand to her forehead.

"She's not going to be sick, is she?" mumbled André uneasily to Madame André, who approached Madame Giry tentatively.

"No, no, I'm fine," snapped Madame Giry, feebly jabbing with the end of her staff at Madame André, who beat a hasty retreat. "I just realized that I have no idea where that daydreaming daughter of mine has gone."

"Oh, you have a daughter!" squealed Madame Firmin happily, clapping her hands and feeling that Madame Giry was easier to relate to with every passing moment, austere black attire notwithstanding. (Madame Firmin was ready to excuse such an affront to fashion on the grounds of the fact that artistic types naturally wore strange and incomprehensible things.)

"I did earlier this evening, at least. Hopefully she's not been abducted by bandits or adoring admirers in my absence," growled Madame Giry, although she knew that Erik wouldn't dare let anyone lay a finger on Meg, let alone do so himself.

"That's right," said André suddenly. "She was the one who danced that lovely solo in the ballet in the last act of the opera." He suddenly wondered if Madame Giry had looked just like that delightful little treat of a dancer when she had been but twenty years old, and the image of a young but equally icy Madame Giry in a black tutu and tights was almost too much for his besotted brain to handle.

"Messieurs, mesdames, I must leave you," announced Madame Giry, with an unsteady nod of her head. "If Meg is still at the opera, I will want to get her home before she exhausts herself too thoroughly to dance well tomorrow evening."

She knew that Meg had probably made it safely home, but in case she was still at the opera house, it was best to remove her before the Phantom unleashed his worst side and left the carnage lying about for Meg to fret over. It was a source of constant frustration to Madame Giry that her own daughter was flighty enough to make such a ridiculous fuss over any potential Phantom-related happening; hopefully, it was attributable to a phase of intense fascination with the masked figure, rather than an enduring failure of character.

"Has her father been able to see her dance in this role yet?" asked Madame Firmin glowingly. "She did such a beautiful job tonight; I hope, if he did not attend, he will be able to see her tomorrow?"

"Oh, he was there tonight," said Madame Giry with a wry smile. "We met each other through the opera house, you know; he's a tremendous supporter of the institution, and goes to all of the opening nights of new productions. And no doubt he will be there tomorrow, as well - I can assure you that he was unendingly enthusiastic about Miss Christine Daaé's début tonight, as was everyone else. And now, goodnight to you all."

André sighed as he watched the severe figure in black make her way carefully up the cobblestone road, back towards the Opéra Populaire's extinguished exterior a few blocks away. Although he knew very well that he was married and drunk out of his mind, and that Madame Giry was likewise drunk out of her mind and likely to only barely acknowledge his existence in any future sober encounters, it still bothered him that she was off to go warm some other bloke's bed, while he was stuck with his simpering wife clinging to his arm like she was. He sulked for the rest of the night; his wife attributed it to indigestion, then fell asleep snoring loudly as soon as they had dropped the increasingly flirtatious Monsieur and Madame Firmin off at their doorstep and arrived back at their own home.

As for Madame Giry, she found Meg already asleep on their drawing room sofa with one of Christine's hair ribbons clutched tightly in her hand, and went to bed glad she wouldn't need to search the entire opera house that night for her harebrained child. The next morning, the ballet mistress awoke with a splitting headache and a letter rimmed in black awaiting her at the opera house, announcing that Erik had kidnapped Christine Daaé for an indefinite period of time. While this was irritating on many levels, and took a few weeks to resolve peaceably, Madame Giry was perhaps most annoyed by the fact that no homicides had been committed at all in her absence, and thus drinking all that sherry with the managers was an utterly superfluous exercise.


End file.
